We have an exclusive video of Oliver James, the well known psychologist, author and broadcaster, talking at the recent AQR Trends ‘07 about his fascinating new book Affluenza. The chat is both thought-provoking and funny, and there’s an audience q&a session at the end.

But to see it you’ll need to join our Facebook group. So if you haven’t already done so, join now (300 already have). It’s free, easy, and you’ll find more exclusive content there, including discussions between you guys.

Read the rest of this entry »

6mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Sean Pillot de Chenecey, Captain Crikey
• Sarah Davies, MD, Henley Centre HeadlightVision

Sean refers to his company, Captain Crikey, as an ‘alternative marketing consultancy’ and listening to this chat with Sarah you certainly get an alternative, highly sceptical view of web 2.0, social networks and Second Life. Listen as Sarah defends some of these exciting innovations from the man who believes that luddites are a “…much maligned set of people.”

Sean also shares the reasons why we should have more Chav representation in agencies.

Read the rest of this entry »

10mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• William Higham, Next Big Thing
• Alison Fydler, Joint MD and co-founder, Firefish

Of all the trends discussed during the AQR Trends ‘07 conference, the one William talks about here could be one of the most significant, in our humble opinion. He suggests that age-based targeting is becoming significantly less relevant across many categories. For example, grey folks exhibit teen-like behaviour (eg. still into hedonism and rock ‘n roll) and vice versa (teens exhibiting social responsibility and an interest in politics).

Listen to William as he chats with Alison from the award-winning Firefish, about the wider implications of William’s theories. Interesting tidbit about Alison and William: we randomly paired them up for this chat but little did we know that the two already knew each other from years ago as they were growing up!

BTW, references to ‘Oliver’ are to Oliver James who spoke before this chat took place, and he spoke about his new book, ‘Affluenza’.

Read the rest of this entry »

5mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Dr. Nick Southgate, Planning Partner, Grey Advertising
• Chloe Fowler, Razor Research

Well, that headline certainly got your attention But Nick doesn’t feel it’s an exaggeration, as he explains in this short chat with Chloe.

Read the rest of this entry »

10mins | Produced @ ESOMAR Congress ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Caroline Hayter (Whitehill), Co-founder and Strategist , Acacia Avenue (host)
• Geert van Kuyck, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Management, Philips

Geert van Kuyck of Philips is a seasoned marketing executive, having previously worked at very senior levels in Starbucks and Procter & Gamble. Here he chats with Caroline about the overwhelming need for a more authentic understanding of consumers, among both the research and marketing communities. It may surprise you to learn that he believes there’s such a big gap here (between rhetoric and reality). Have a listen to his take, and on why he regards engagement and humility as key qualities for success.

Thanks to BrainJuicer for making the video possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

14mins | Produced @ ESOMAR Congress ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• David Penn, MD, Conquest Research (host)
• Prof. Lou Marinoff, The City College of New York

Don’t ask us what these guys are talking about, it’s philosophy and way over our heads! Kidding aside, they chat about, among other things, using values from faiths such as Buddhism to build strong and compassionate brands with purpose, meaning, and integrity, essentially brands that can do good and be good.

Thanks to BrainJuicer for making the video possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

The [Google] Adwords business was about monetizing the contextuality. Now it’s starting to happen and I don’t really like it, people want to monetize your intimacy

13mins | Produced @ ESOMAR Congress ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Tariq Krim, CEO, Netvibes

We were about to film the chat when Tariq mentioned his computer, with the presentation he was about to give, had crashed. He only had around an hour to recreate it and we stole about 15mins from that, but he was cool and that’s pretty impressive for a guy who founded and has built the Netvibes web 2.0 personalized home page into one of the world’s most popular blog readers and so has quite a weight of expectations on his shoulders.

This chat is probably more interesting for you web 2.0/research 2.0 folks out there. We touch on

• The attention economy
• Behavioural data, privacy, data portability
• Widgets and Netvibes’ business model
• Netvibes’ short-term road map
• The neutral hub to organise your social life
• Ensuring business models don’t stifle innovation
• Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs
• The long/short game (shamelessly nicked from Lindsey)
• Notable mentions: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, OpenID, RSS, Yahoo

Thanks to BrainJuicer for making the video possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like Russell, we’re big fans of Peter Day’s In Business and Global Business (BBC).

In the latest Global Business, Peter chats with Professor Gary Hamel, a leading management author and thinker, about some of the themes in his new book, The Future of Management.

His key message to leaders is to shift from a culture of control to one that embraces personal creativity, posturing that this is the only path to future innovation, growth and prosperity.

The chat contains some really stirring stuff and strikes a perfect resonance with the zeitgeist (unleashing personal creativity, wisdom of crowds, bottom-up innovation, global talent etc.). We liked it so much that we spent the time to pick out some choice quotes:

“You can buy obedience and diligence and even intellect almost anywhere in the world for next to nothing.”

“We’re going to have to get people to bring to work their initiative, their creativity, their passion, and those are human capabilities that cannot be commanded. Those are gifts that people either choose to bring to work or not.”

“The existing management model was built to drive alignment, enforcement and control. What management tried to do over the last 100 years was to regularise the irregular, to drive the variety out of processes…we happen to live in a world today where it’s irregular people with irregular ideas who create all the new economic value and the wealth.”

“Organisations are less human than the people who work there. [people are inherently creative and innovative] but somehow when we get to work that adaptability, that innovation literally gets bleached out of people between 9 and 5.”

“The ability to aggregate human capability via the web, that’s not going to go away.”

Management innovation at W. L. Gore & Associates: “Every employee is free to say yes or no to any request. Most managers would have a very hard time imagining how you can get things done in an organsation where you can’t use any of your positional power (because you have none); people have to be persuaded. People are annually evaluated by 20 peers on the value they create [rather than via a hierarchy based on following strict instructions].”

Management innovation at Google: “The folks who run that they don’t primarily see themselves as the authors of strategy, they see themselves as editors of strategy…ideas bubble up.”

Pop here for the episode (hopefully it will stay archived).

Series:AdTalk Series:MarketingTalk

We likes powerful data visualization. After all, some of the best examples take data to a new level and help move people to action.

But not all applications are worth applying data viz to. In this video, Eric Rodenbeck, founder of design studio Stamen takes us through a few applications that do seem to make sense.

Based on live datasets, these involve Flickr, web 2.0 real estate site Trulia, and a SF Yellow Cab mapping initiative called Cabspotting.

One part we like is when Eric says that they’re not interested in the underlying technology, even though one of their team has developed the underlying software (and even better, made it open source).

You’ll find a much better writeup here, courtesy of Scribe Media, the folks who produced the video (and more besides).

Go here for the video (we couldn’t embed without it playing automatically when the page loaded, which slowed load times for everyone, never a good thing )

Series:AdTalk Series:MarketingTalk